WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — NASCAR will delay its lone preseason event by two additional days to Wednesday as North Carolina digs out one of its biggest snowstorms in years.
The Clash, originally scheduled for Sunday at Bowman Gray Stadium, will now run Wednesday on the historic quarter-mile track that doubles as the home football stadium for Winston-Salem State University.
Practice and qualifying is set for 1:30 p.m. ET on the Fox Sports App and FOX One. FOX coverage will start at 4:30 p.m. for the 75-lap last chance qualifying race, followed by the 200-lap main event at 6 p.m. ET.
The Winston-Salem area got eight inches of snow Saturday, while the area between there and Charlotte — where most of the teams are based — got 10-15 inches of snow. The race originally was postponed Saturday to Monday and while roads started to improve Sunday, the ability of teams (the crew members are home and not in the vicinity of the track) and fans to get to the track safely led to the decision.
The Charlotte area got 11 inches of snow, making it one of the top-five highest single-day snowfalls in the history of the city. It was the most snow Winston-Salem had gotten since 2018.
Clash manager Justin Swilling said the decision was made in consultation with the city of Winston-Salem (which owns the facility that achieved national exposure with the “Madhouse” reality series) and state transportation officials. It has been a busy couple of weeks after a sleet storm a week prior to the Clash.
“When we all woke up this morning, we were all on the same page,” Swilling said. “It’s going to take a day or two to get the industry out of the snow that they’re found in the greater Charlotte area and get them up here. It’s going to take us a few days to get the stadium cleaned off. The city felt that responsibility as well.
“The state was supportive of saying it’s not good to have people on the roads right now, try to stay home if you can, but when things warm up, hopefully earlier in this coming week, we’ll get to a really good place. They’ve done a great job with primary and even some secondary roads in and around this area. It was actually a fairly aligned decision from the moment we started talking about Wednesday.”
Swilling said NASCAR did consider conducting the event with fans.
“Anytime anybody’s come to the Madhouse for an event, you know that it’s just as much the fans as it is the competitors that makes it a show,” Swilling said.
“So we explored all scenarios, but at the end of the day, we wanted to give ourselves plenty of time. We wanted to give the community plenty of time, as well, to get over the most recent storms that we’ve had, and we felt that Wednesday was the safest time to have everybody ascend on Bowman Gray Stadium. And we feel good about that.”
If this was a race during the season, NASCAR might have been more willing to do it without fans, as teams would need to get to the next weekend’s event. But with on-track activity for the Daytona 500 not beginning until the following Wednesday (Feb. 11), NASCAR was not facing a hard decision as far as next-event logistics.
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